Sunday, March 08, 2009

New Ways of Being Church

With life having got a teensy bit quieter recently I'm anxious to breathe some life into the whole new ways of being church discussion. I met a couple recently who have started a conversation, no more no less, with another couple in the Portishead area about moving on from traditional church and what's next. They got me energised.

If you are local to Nailsea and have something to say I'm thinking of nominating a night of the week where I'll be down at the Old Farmhouse to talk. Are there any immediate thoughts and comments anyone wants to make?

5 comments:

Caroline Too said...

I'm not from Nailsea, but I hope that I'm allowed to comment...

I love the expression "Church without walls" - it captures much of what I long to be a part of... a community out there within another community, carrying amongst us the Spirit that creates a Kingdom of God...

a liquid community who organise getting together with an eye on what they're doing apart and together 'out there', whose gatherings (around a table, with coffee or bread and wine?) are structured to encourage, equip and comfort each other in the daily struggle of making God apparent to their neighbours

a community who, every now and again, can't help but notice and remind each other about how wonderful their God is...

but to do all that will upset the tables in the church-within-walls and hurt (upset) those who cherish that, solid church... and I don't want to upset them for, apart from anything else, they seem to lash out at me when I'm careless and upset them...

Chris said...

this is an interesting topic that i've sort of been thinking about recently. having just moved to a totally new part of the country (to us - it's not that this part of the country hasn't existed before!) e and i have to find a new church to go to. or is it a new church to belong to? i think that's what we're missing, the belonging bit, not the going along to church bit.

so how do we decide which church we'd like to join? we go along to it and assess it on some rather arbitrary things, such as the music, the sermon / talk, how friendly the people seem, what the coffee tastes like, how comfortable the seats are (this was a big issue on sunday for me!). at the end of the day this will probably not really tell us anything much about whether or not we'll be happy being a part of that church community or not. perhaps a little bit.

so still wondering how we're going to make our decision. still too many places to "check out" when i think we'd just like to choose one and go for it to get to know some people...

Anonymous said...

If your bored, fancy coming across the bridge to Chepstow with some good ideas? I went to our Church's "new way of doing Church" thing last Friday. Differences between it and a normal Sunday morning service were
- some of the songs were written in the last 20 years
- there was coffee and biscuits on a table if you wanted them.

Oh, for just a small vestige of imagination!

Anonymous said...

Sorry: your -> you're
was -> were

Yours illiterately,

Jon

RuthJ said...

Your life has got a teensy bit quieter?? Tell me your secret!